A lowercase first word pulls the reader into a life already in progress. Risa Bear’s “Or, Sometimes” addresses a future self, or any reader, as “you,” imagining a day spent kneeling in garden soil, moving worms out of the way, and then walking back to the house for a quiet lunch. The central insight is not that gardening is pleasant, but that careful physical labor can become a wordless conversation: after the digging, there is nothing to say because the hands have already said it to the earth.
The first stanza is built as one long, unspooling sentence that moves at the pace of a trowel. Free verse keeps the rhythm loose but deliberate; line breaks create small pauses that mimic the work. The opening phrase, “lovingly rooting / in earth,” suggests both digging and becoming rooted, as if the gardener is partly plant. The speaker watches “fat worms” sink “with shrugs of their nonexistent / shoulders,” a small, comic touch that also shows tenderness—these creatures are not pests but neighbours. At the same time, the phrase “your wrists dry up, caked / in clay” keeps the body present, cracked and dirtied by the task.
From that close focus, the poem widens into a litany of the gardener’s world: “your small red barn, your irises, / your bamboo patch, your ash and oak,” and later “your mint and parsley putting on new life, / your pears and apples, your geese in their bright plumes.” The repeated “your” could sound possessive, but here it sounds more like belonging both ways. The house is “bracketed in lilacs, breathing / smoke,” and the maples are “whispering in the breeze,” so the landscape itself seems alive and responsive. The list builds a whole ecosystem of care, yet it does not end in easy satisfaction. Instead, all these presences “will bring to you the thought of what this is / that you are digging, bit by troweled bit.” The question is left unanswered. “Bit by troweled bit” slows the line down to the scale of small human effort, acknowledging that whatever the digging means, it is made of increments.
The second stanza shifts from a predicted future into an accepting present: “Assuming that the clouds will come, which now / they do, you will take things as they are.” The sentence is plain and almost flat, and that plainness is the point. The gardener walks toward the house with an “even-tempered / gaze,” expecting no revelation. The lunch is “late” and “cold,” an ordinary meal stripped of ceremony. Most importantly, it is “one without words, for there are no words / to share what it was your hands / said to the green earth even now.” The poem chooses silence not as failure but as completion. It ends on “even now,” leaving the reader inside that quiet present, where understanding is bodily rather than verbal.
The significance of “Or, Sometimes” lies in this refusal to translate the experience into a tidy moral. The title, with its odd comma, hints that the scene is only one possible way of coming to terms with a life—one path among others. The poem does not argue; it imagines. In doing so, it grants dignity to small acts of care, to clay-caked wrists, and to the strange, wordless knowledge that passes between a pair of hands and the ground.